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Victor

by Martin Figura

As fathers stroll home from work
there is no birdsong and the November light
is all but gone.

Small boys run amok in avenues,
take cover behind privet hedges –
the smell of cordite, heavy in the air.

Over the traffic, the sound of battle:
grenades whistling overhead, the sporadic
rattle of toy guns from doorways.

At teatime, those whose turn it is
break cover, make a zigzagging run for it
shouting – ACHTUNG ACHTUNG.

They go down in a hail of bullets
competing for the most dramatic death.
The pavement is so littered with Germans

the men must pick a way through
to reach their gates and take their sons
down paths into quiet houses.

About this poem

First published in 2009.

Winner of the Hamish Canham Prize 2010; and a winner of the *Poetry News* Members' Poems competition on the theme of 'Heroes & Heroines', judged by Kathryn Simmonds. The collection *Whistle* was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 2010.

His collection, *Whistle*, published by Arrowhead in March, and in which ‘Victor’ appears, marked a major change of direction for Figura. In it, Figura deals with the murder in 1966 of his mother, June, by his father Frank when Figura was just nine years old. “It is the first time I have broached the subject so directly,” he says.

The story is told in spare, compact poems that pack together anger, grief and bewilderment – “this last film / dark and tightly rolled” of Figura’s growing-up. Figura also ventures into the mind of his father, a German army soldier and POW, who was to become a patient at Broadmoor Hospital. “I wanted to investigate my ongoing relationship with my father, one in which I held all the cards but which power I didn’t always use compassionately,” Figura says.

Martin Figura was born in Liverpool and lives in Norwich. His collections include The Little Book of Harm (Firewater Press, 2000), Ahem (Eggbox, 2005) and Whistle (Arrowhead, 2010), which deals with the murder in 1966 of his mother, June, by his father Frank. It was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2010. His poem ‘Victor’ won the Poetry Society’s 2010 Hamish Canham Prize. In 2013 Nasty Little Press published the pamphlet Arthur. He is chair of Café Writers, Norwich.